Specializing in being a generalist
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User Interface
How this website’s design came about
When I first started working exclusively as a software engineer, people who knew me as a designer were convinced I had gone mad: “Who wouldn’t want to do design?” Short answer: Me. I did design for other people for the first 7 years of my career, and let me tell you – it sucked. It sucked because all of my effort and inspiration would go into a design, only to have it reduced to, “Can you make it blue instead of brown – my wife likes blue.” That was an actual, real statement for my last design client. It wasn’t that this was the first time I had received feedback on my designs (and this was by no stretch of imagination the worst feedback I have every gotten), but it was the last straw. It would be years before I opened Photoshop and Illustrator again.
Why I finally decided to start a blog
Back in 1998, I made my first real, publicly accessible website. It was NeilsMachine.com (long since taken down), and it was a “blog” before blogs were blogs. I talked about nothing at all, because I really had nothing to say. Shortly after my NeilsMachine days, I got caught up in my professional career and let all my personal sites languish and die. When I did my own consultancy, I never managed to get a website up, which always bothered me. The challenge, I found, is that when would I have time to do my own website when I was building sites for others? I made several good stabs at it – including one design that to this day is still very cool – but they never saw the light of day.